Reception Class

EYFS Curriculum Key

October 2025 Round-up

What a wonderful first half term it has been in Reception! The children have settled beautifully into school life, making new friends, learning classroom routines, and growing in confidence each day. Enjoy looking through the photos together below and discuss each area of learning with your child to see what they can remember. As we say frequently in class, we go over our learning again and again “so we don’t forget!”

CL - The children have loved participating in Drawing Club, exploring a new focus book each week and learning lots of exciting new vocabulary to add to our working wall. We’ve been learning definitions for each new word and attaching an action to help us remember them - ask your child to show you one of our “get up, stand up, vocabulary!” actions!

PD - We’ve been strengthening our core muscles through lots of large movement activities, helping to prepare our bodies for writing. Our classroom is full of fine motor opportunities too - threading, cutting, weaving, and playdough all help to get our fingers flexible. We’re also working hard on independence by learning to dress ourselves, fasten our coats, and manage our shoes and wellies by ourselves.

PSE - We’ve completed our unit 'Self Regulation: My Feelings', learning how to identify and name our emotions, recognise how they might feel in our bodies, and associate feelings with different colours. The children have explored facial expressions, learned emotional vocabulary, and talked about how storybook characters might be feeling. Together, we created our very own Calm Corner - a special space where the children can go to take a breath, reflect, and use the coping strategies we’ve practised to help manage their emotions.

L - We’re well underway with Phase 2 Phonics, learning new GPCs and building a bank of phonics games to help embed our learning. The children are learning to blend sounds to read CVC words and are starting to apply their phonics in early writing. Ask your child which phonics game is their favourite! Look out for our Autumn 2 Phonics Meeting for parents, where we’ll share how we teach early reading and writing in Reception.

M - Our maths learning this half term has focused on developing strong number sense. The children have learned to subitise (recognise quantities without counting) within 3 and to spot sub-groups in larger arrangements. We’ve explored patterns within 4, practised using fingers to represent quantities, and even begun subitising sounds and movements! The children have been counting in sequence through songs and rhymes, using 1:1 correspondence to count accurately. We’ve also compared sets of objects, using the language of ‘more than’, ‘fewer than’, and ‘equal to’, and found that sometimes we can compare ‘just by looking’!

UTW - We’ve begun to lay the foundations for history by learning about the days of the week, using our visual timetable, and exploring what it means when we talk about things that have happened in the past. In our outdoor classroom and forest school sessions, we’ve been investigating seasonal changes, noticing how Autumn brings falling leaves, colder weather, and darker evenings. We’ve talked about how some trees change across the four seasons and learned that the weather changes throughout the year. In RE, we’ve been sharing stories and discussions about our families, learning that while all families are special, each one is unique and different.

EAD - We couldn’t be prouder of the children for their singing during our poetry performance event, where they stood on the big stage and performed Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer! The children have been expressing themselves through art, music, and imaginative play.

So much fun and learning have filled these first eight weeks of school! We hope we’ve sparked a lifelong love of learning, and we can’t wait to see what magic awaits us in Autumn 2.

September 2025 Round-up

We hope this page helps jog your little learner’s memory and prompts them to share all the exciting things they’ve been doing in school.

Our first topic is ‘Marvellous Me!’ and we’ve really enjoyed getting to know each other while celebrating the many ways we are all unique.

CL - We’ve been busy talking, chatting, and making new friends during our settling-in activities. The children have also met Tony the Tiger, who joins us for circle time. Tony helps us remember to be respectful listeners by keeping our eyes on the speaker.

PD - The children have had so many opportunities to get active and strengthen their gross motor skills. Each Monday, we are joined by sports coaches Jamie and Aaron from Fleetwood Town Community, who lead our balance bike sessions. The children are growing in confidence, developing their core strength, balance, and hand–eye coordination. They have also loved taking part in PE lessons. Our first unit introduces the 'Lancashire 5 under 5' – a framework for developing fundamental movement skills (FMS). These focus on teaching children how to run, hop, jump, throw (both underarm and overarm), and catch.

PSE - This half term, our focus text is The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas. We’re learning to explore and understand our feelings - identifying when we may be feeling something, and learning how to communicate and cope with our emotions. The children love our class meditation sessions and are becoming confident in using the calm corner in our classroom.

L - We’ve begun our Red Rose phonics lessons – the games bring so much joy and laughter to our classroom. Can you spot Mr Crocodile in the photos below? As the children are introduced to new phonemes, we also practise forming the cursive graphemes. We’ve done lots of mark making with different media and we’re getting to grips with the pinch of a tripod grasp.

M - Our Maths lessons are linked to The Numberblocks. We’ve focused on numbers 1, 2, and 3 – learning when a set can be subitised and when careful counting is needed. We’re also beginning to spot smaller numbers ‘hiding’ inside larger numbers.

UTW - What an exciting time of year to be exploring the world around us! We’ve loved noticing the change in seasons during forest school sessions and have had so much fun playing with autumnal treasures in our outdoor classroom too.

EAD - We have such a musical class this year! Our children are amazing singers and our classroom is often filled with nursery rhymes. In the art room, we’ve been busy creating all sorts of crafts and each child has drawn a wonderful self-portrait for our gallery wall.

July 2025 Round-up

June 2025 Round-up

Our topic for Summer 2 is 'Everyone Explore', Reception have loved discovering what life's like in different places around the world. No doubt you've all got the seven continents song going round and round in your heads!

CL - Reception have been talking about the similarities and differences between life in this country and life in other countries, drawing on their personal experiences, knowledge from stories and non-fiction texts and observations of maps. The new wall graphics in the hall helped us with this.

PD - In PE this half term, we're consolidating the fundamental movement skills we've been working on all year. We're also busy working on a nursery rhyme dance unit. Mr Aspden arranged a fun 'Health Week' for us all and we took part in ultimate frisbee, UV dodgeball, Taekwondo and our very first Sports Day.

PSE - In our PSHE lessons, we've discussed how we look after our wellbeing through exercise, meditation and eating a balanced diet. We're all independent learners who can manage our own hygiene needs and understand the importance of making healthy choices.

L - The children have wowed us with their sentence writing in preparation for Year One. We know that every super sentence should be spoken aloud first, begin with a capital letter, have letters formed correctly (sitting on the line), we use our phonics to help us segment to spell, add a finger space between words, finish it all off with a full stop and read it back to check it makes sense! There's so much to remember, but we're practicing lots and enjoying writing for many different purposes.

M - We've been doing lots of counting beyond 20 in Maths, spotting number patterns including double facts and whether numbers are odd, or even. The children love saying. . . "Oohh, that's odd!" when a quantity can't be shared into two equal groups.

UTW - We took our learning outside the classroom with a class trip to Blackpool Zoo. We've been scientists in forest school, making boats to experiment with different materials and their properties, testing which float and which sink. The children have been busy helping Mrs Mylecraine with her planting, and we're excited to find out the results of the Wyre in Bloom competition.

EAD - We walked to Thornton Library and joined 'Mama G' for an exciting session of songs and stories, encouraging us to take pride in who we are. A big thank you to Francis from Lancashire Music Service for our fun lessons on the djembe drums.

May 2025 Round-up

Our topic for Summer 1 was 'Amazing Animals' and our little learners have had so much fun learning and playing.

CL - We've been retelling the story What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson, the children were fantastic performing in front of the whole school and their friends and families in our class assembly.

PD - We've enjoyed lots of indoor and outdoor PE lessons, experimenting with moving our bodies like farm, ocean and zoo animals.

PSE - Our discussions taught us that we all have different beliefs and celebrations, what characteristics make a good friend, and how we need to listen to one another.

L - The class are well underway with Phase 4 phonics, reading longer words, compound words and words with suffixes -ing and -ed. You can find a list of Tricky words here: Tricky Words The children have discovered lots of new vocabulary and fun facts reading both fiction and non-fiction texts about animals.

M - EYFS are working on the composition of numbers, we're aiming to know our number bonds to 5 (and some to 10) off by heart.

UTW - I wonder what your child can remember about Mary Anning? The children loved learning about dinosaurs and fossils. We had a video call with Farmer Rachel which helped us learn where our food comes from.

EAD - The children will soon be brining home their amazing clay animal sculptures! They've worked so hard to design, plan and create them.